Studenda Mira

After the last post , I poked around the library a bit to see if I could find more substantive information on Yemen's Akhdam and their traditional association with the region's 6th C. Aksumite conquerors. I found "Akhdam tribe in servitude," a 1976 Geographical article by James Horgen. His version of the "commonly held myth about their ancestry...heard from both illiterate tribesmen and learned scholars" goes something like this: After 570, Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an, the Jewish Himyarite aristocrat who'd successfully entreatied Sassanid Persia to deliver his people from Aksumite Christian dominion, was installed as Persia's vassal. He killed the surviving Aksumite fighters, save for a few who were kept as a ceremonial guard for his processions. Ceremonial or not, the Aksumites still carried spears. They played along with the pomp for a while, but one day, they turned those spears on Sayf ibn dhi-Yaz'an and assassinated him. This prompted the...

Old City Sana'a Photo by eesti . On the heels of the last post, I was entranced by this lush travel article in the New York Times (free registration required) about the Yemeni island of Socotra, off the Horn of Africa. It's not difficult to imagine traders on that Alexandria-India run porting here for one last pit stop before the big push across the Arabian Sea: Socotra is significantly inhabited, and has been for some 2,000 years. More than 40,000 people now live there: many in Hadibu, the island’s main town, the rest scattered in small stone villages, working as fishermen and semi-nomadic Bedouin herders. Nature and culture are longstanding neighbors. I especially liked this bit: Lying on the rocky ground, with the scent of frankincense fresh in memory, I felt as though I had stumbled into a chapter of the Old Testament. Well before dawn I woke to the sound of the family patriarch’s voice warbling a long, mournful prayer. He finished after a few minutes, and the ni...

Ruins of Palmyra Photo courtesy of Hovic . Palmyra had never really wanted or needed to be part of anyone's empire. Located on the largest oasis in the Syrian desert, it had been inhabited by Bedouins and similar nomadic peoples since before 1000 B.C.. Its position near the western end of the Silk Road provided access to all the best trade routes to Persia, India and the Far East, and local families did a brisk business in outfitting caravans for the perilous journey. This specialization came in handy in 41 B.C., when Mark Antony, learning of Palmyra's wealth, tried to raid the city. The Palmyrans got wind of his approach, and easily spirited their treasure across the Euphrates until the danger passed. Palmyra improbably persisted as an quasi-independent state on the border between two mutually antagonistic superpowers. But the city's situation remained precarious. In A.D. 18, an envoy from the Emperor Tiberius arrived, probably to make the usual imperial offe...

By the final years of Justinian's reign, the heady era of Belisarius's western reconquests was only a memory. In 542, a devastating plague—very likely an earlier strain of Y. pestis , the bacterium behind the medieval Black Death—swept through the East and killed a third or more of the population. It took the economic and military stuffing out of the Empire, forcing it to buy an expensive peace from the Sassanid king Khosro I in 545 and leaving it unable to check the ravages of the nascent Slavs and Bulgars in the Balkans. Constantinople was on the defensive. The emperor himself hadn't been the same since his wife Theodora had died, probably from ovarian cancer, in 548. Without the counsel and support of the woman who had convinced him not to abandon his throne during the Nika riots in 532, Justinian showed little interest in governing his shrinking, increasingly destitute empire. He instead preoccupied himself with the theological disputes for which Byzantium would be...